Winter of the Gods

by Jordanna Max Brodsky

  “Bad enough you told them Selene was captured,” Dash explained breathlessly. “Now you want them there when you finally talk to these murderers? The cult will reveal our true identities!”

  Theo looked from one god to the other, flabbergasted. “We know the initiates are mortal. Yet they can use divine weapons. That means we’re facing a group of potentially overwhelming size and strength. We’re going to need reinforcements, but you’d let Selene die because you refuse help from the police? Are you really so afraid that a bunch of hard-nosed detectives are going to suddenly believe you’re all three-thousand-year-old gods? Are you insane?”

  But Dash remained adamant. “We do this our way.”

  Theo spun to Flint. “What about you? You don’t want to call the cops either? You’re going to sacrifice Selene to protect a secret that doesn’t need protecting? I thought you cared about her. At least that’s what it looked like this morning on top of Rock Center.”

  Dash rounded on the Smith. Suddenly they were all talking at once.

  Flint silenced them with a raised hand. “I’m not worried about the secret. But once the police are involved, they’ll take all the cult’s initiates into custody. We’ll never get the answers we need about how they found out about us in the first place. If we don’t know that, we’ll never be safe again.”

  Theo had nothing more to say. He had no intention of following their commands, but arguing further was simply a waste of time. And Selene might not have much time left. He pulled his hat low around his ears and headed for the elevator. Philippe offered him a weak “Bonne chance” as the doors slid closed. Then the elevator sprang back open, and Flint stood before him, holding out his hand.

  “Let me see your spectacles.”

  Theo grudgingly complied. Flint affixed a tiny black dot to the left temple of the wire eyeglasses. “You can’t leave without a way to communicate with us. Do you remember the plan? The code?”

  “Yeah. Sure.” Theo took back his glasses, refusing to look impressed at yet another of the miraculous inventions the Smith had pulled from his bag of wonders. He jabbed the “Door Closed” button.

  Flint stuck the edge of one crutch into the closing doors and leaned forward once more. His voice was a barely audible rumble. “We’ll get Selene out no matter whose help we have to enlist. The others will never agree to it, but I know you’re right. Try my plan first, Schultz, but if it doesn’t work, I’ll call the cops. You have my word.”

  Selene closed her eyes and buried her face in her hands as if that might erase the sight of Theo’s aged face from her mind. “It’s not real,” she murmured into her palms. Yet if she stayed with Theo, what other future could there be?

  She rubbed her face, hard, and then stared up defiantly at the ceiling. “You think to scare me,” she shouted. “Illusions and trickery. Aphrodite’s mirror torments the holder with thoughts of love and loss, but I am the Chaste One! Such things mean nothing to me.”

  She tried to believe her own words, reminding herself that even if the image in the mirror were a true prophecy, it mattered little unless she escaped from the cell. If they killed her, she’d never have a chance to know just how miserable she and Theo could have made each other.

  She rose to her feet and placed her palms against the walls, searching for some weakness that might allow her to break out of the chamber. She paced the perimeter, tapping for any sign of hollowness. They called me She Who Helps One Climb Out, she reminded herself. Walls cannot contain me. And when I finally escape, I will come for those who chain me here. I am the Relentless One, the Punisher, the Far Shooter.

  As if summoned by her recital of epithets, a sudden hallucination overwhelmed her. This time, she recognized it for what it was: a memory of her past, brought to vivid life by Morpheus’s crown. That didn’t make it easier to resist. Her body registered pain as she fell heavily to her knees, but her mind was elsewhere, sucked into the past like a broken twig trapped in a whirlpool’s grip.

  I hear my mother crying from half a world away.

  Gentle Leto, neat-ankled and veiled, sits in the halls of Olympus, her distaff unwound at her feet, her tears hidden by her hands. I arrive only moments before my twin, for neither of us can bear our mother’s suffering.

  “Tell us what brings you such grief,” I command.

  She does not speak. She is too modest to complain of her own woes. But Apollo kneels beside her, and the bright rays of his face dry her tears. He speaks in gentle tones more suited to our mother’s ways, and she finally lifts her eyes to his.

  “Niobe, Queen of Thebes, bans my rituals from her city,” she says. “She has borne seven daughters and seven sons, and counts herself more worthy of homage than I, who gave birth to only one of each. She brags that though some children may be lost, she will never be reduced to two, while I am near to childless.”

  We do not wait to hear more, my twin and I, for that would but delay the punishment. Clothed in clouds, we glide swiftly down to the city upon our gleaming chariots. There we hear Niobe’s words of contempt. She speaks of Artemis, girt like a man in a short tunic, and Apollo with his womanly hair. “Leto should not be proud of her sickly litter,” she says, “but rather ashamed to bring two such into the world.”

  Aflame with rage, Apollo raises his silver bow and showers shafts upon the seven sons of Thebes. But even as the sisters rail and weep beside their brothers’ biers, Niobe speaks bold.

  “Feast upon my misery, cruel Leto! Satiate your relentless heart with seven deaths. More remains to me in my misery than to you in your happiness: After so many deaths I triumph still, glorying in these my seven daughters.”

  Hard on her words my bowstring twangs, my fury a heartless wind that hurls forth my own golden shafts.

  A daughter wrenches an arrow from her vitals and swoons away with her cheek upon her brother’s breast. I do not hesitate as I seek out further prey—a girl who tries to comfort poor Niobe, then falls suddenly silent, doubled by her wound. Another, vainly flying, collapses with an arrow in her heart. The fifth dies upon her sister, and the sixth trembles in concealment and prays silently to me even as I bring her swift death. The last is left.

  She is little more than a child, with terror-wide eyes and thin arms clutched across her narrow ribs. Niobe shields this youngest daughter with her whole body and begs aloud for mercy, all her hubris fled. But I, stony hearted, raise my golden bow.

  The cry of Leto herself, descending from the heavens to witness our wrath, comes too late to stay my hand.

  The arrow slips beneath the mother’s arm and into the daughter’s breast. The girl screams like a small animal in a hawk’s talons, pure terror ripped from her throat, echoing through the palace until the cry of one child sounds like the wails of fourteen. The sound goes on and on. I listen, unmoved, as it finally dies to a whimper. Then there is silence.

  The Goddess of Motherhood kneels in horror beside the girl’s limp form.

  “What have you done?” she asks us. “Such vengeance offends me more than Niobe’s overweening words.”

  We lay down our shafts, Apollo and I, but we feel regret only for our mother’s pain, not for the destruction we have wrought.

  Niobe grieves, rigid beside the corpses of her children. Gentle Leto, the merciful one, prays to Zeus our father that he might ease Niobe’s suffering. In answer, he turns the woman’s stony frame to stone itself.

  Now, among the rugged crags and sky-encountering crests of mountains, sits the Rock of Niobe. The likeness of a woman bowed in the depths of anguish. A broken heart in the guise of shattered stone. Men pass with feet fear-goaded, and from the rock pour waterfalls. Weeping, weeping … grief-stricken … endless.

  As Selene emerged from the memory, a swimmer fighting through a maelstrom, the weeping went on. After a moment, she knew the sobs came from her own throat. She cried for Niobe as she never had before. On Governors Island, the memory of the Great Gathering had reminded her of her impotence, leaving her hopeless and melancholy. Thi
s memory of unchecked power was far worse. She could not erase the image of the children reaching in vain for the arrows that pierced their flesh, teeth bared as they gasped their last breaths. Now she heard the prayers she’d once ignored—their pleading, their terror, their agonized questions, “Why me? What have I done?”

  Selene clapped her hands over her ears, but the prayers pulsed inside her, an unrelenting keening punctuated by the animalistic shrieks of that last little girl. This is merely a ploy by the cult to make me weak, she thought desperately. But no matter the source, the memory was true. She was a monster. Her gut tightened, seized, and she doubled over, her empty stomach retching bile as if to purge herself of all the evil inside her.

  When even the bile was gone, she lay beside the stinking puddle, chest heaving, cold sweat coating her arms and legs. How long has Paul suffered from memories like this? she wondered, finally understanding his despair. No wonder he wants to die. No wonder mankind wants us to die. Why worship those they could not trust, could not respect, could not love? Her tears returned, harder this time, and she grieved for Niobe’s children, for her twin, and for Theo, too. For how could he love someone so cruel? The mirror’s message became clear: The horror was not that Theo would grow old and die, but that she would despise him for doing so.

  “Who’s there?” The voice came through the grate above her head, the faintest of whispers.

  Selene choked back her sobs and lay in frozen anticipation.

  The voice spoke again, hoarse like that of an old man. “Who’s crying?”

  She held her tongue, wondering what new torment lay in store.

  “Athanaton tis eis?” The voice pleaded; it did not demand.

  Who else but another god would speak to her in Ancient Greek, asking if she were an immortal? Those who’d captured her already knew who and what she was.

  She decided to risk it. “Nai. Eimi he agrotera. Eimi desmios,” she replied, slowly levering herself off the ground so she could stand closer to the grate. Yes, I’m the Huntress. I’m a prisoner.

  He continued to speak in the ancient tongue. “It is a bitter, bitter thing that you have joined me in captivity. I can only hope your end will be swifter than my own.”

  “Who are you?” she begged.

  “I am merely the Praenuntius.”

  She wondered at the Latin word. “The Harbinger?” She knew of no such god, even in the Roman pantheon.

  “We all have many names, do we not, Good Maiden? Praenuntius is only the most recent of them. But it is the title by which my captors call me, and thus has it become my truest self. But I was once the Chained One. The Lofty-Minded.” He laughed then, a rusty, half-formed sound. “They named me ‘Forethought.’ Though if I had ever seen this future before me, I would have killed myself long ago.”

  Chapter 29

  THE TITANS

  The Titan god Prometheus spoke of five hundred years of captivity and torture at the hands of his own creations.

  It was hard to hear. They had chained him to a hospital bed, he said, subject to unending torment. Selene could imagine it—it was not so different from what her own father had done to him in another age. Punishment for the crime of putting mankind above the gods.

  After Prometheus had created mortals from earth and water, he imbued each of them with the breath of his own spirit. He loved these mortal children of his so much that he dared steal fire from the hearth of Olympus and bring it down to them in a hollow fennel stalk. When Zeus discovered the theft, he chained Prometheus to a rock. Every day, Zeus’s sacred eagle swooped down upon the prisoner and ate his liver. Each night, the organ regrew, so the eagle might feast anew the next day. And so it went for untold centuries, with the kindest and best of gods suffering at the hands of his own kin.

  In all that time, the Huntress remembered seeing Prometheus in the flesh only a handful of times. In his prime, he’d been as broad-shouldered as Atlas, but while his brother’s gaze was hard gray stone, Prometheus looked at the world with eyes as warm and soft as the rich soil from which he crafted mankind.

  She’d seen him again when she’d happened across the mountainside where he suffered in captivity. Arms pinned above him, he hung naked from the stone. His ribs pumped like a bellows beneath his skin, riding high and swollen so that his bare stomach lay exposed to the eagle’s wicked beak. If he opens his eyes, will they still be warm and kind? she’d wondered. Then she’d heard the shrill cry of an approaching bird and decided she wouldn’t wait to find out. After all, Prometheus deserved his fate.

  Once again, Selene realized, I heard only the clarion call of vengeance, not the cries of suffering.

  “Why has the cult kept you for so long?” she asked aloud, pushing aside her own recriminations.

  “I’m the Praenuntius. The Harbinger.”

  “Yes, you said that.” He repeated himself often. I suppose he only has a few stories to tell, she thought, feeling guilty for her impatience. The fact that he’s kept his mind intact at all is remarkable. “What exactly do they expect you to foretell?”

  “As I decline, so do you. They have prepared all these centuries so they might be ready when the time was right.”

  “Right for …”

  “Killing you. And all your kind.”

  “Yes, but why?” she demanded, breaking into English. “Is this really all about some cult of Mithras?”

  “Mithras and more than Mithras.” He spoke in English now, but with the slight Latin accent that she’d lost a thousand years before.

  “Uh-huh …” She didn’t understand. Not at all. But deciphering the Titan’s mysterious pronouncements had at least given her a purpose. A glimmer of hope.

  “They made me do it,” he said after a long moment.

  “Do what?”

  “They needed my pneuma. I gave it to them. Just enough to let them wield the weapons they had stolen.”

  Pneuma. The breath of divinity within each Athanatos. She didn’t possess the ability to transfer it to a mortal—if she did, she might have given it to Theo. But Prometheus’s pneuma had brought the very first humans to life. Even more than the sacred coals he stole from Olympus’s hearth, that divine breath was the true gift of the Fire-Bearer. I should be angry with him for giving these madmen the use of our weapons, Selene knew. But she didn’t have the luxury of anger; she needed information. Prometheus represented her only chance of escaping before the Pater killed her.

  “Do you know where we are?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Where did they capture you?”

  “I can barely remember. But at the Diaspora, I did not stray far from our ancient home.”

  “Then how did you wind up in New York?”

  “New York?” He pronounced the English name carefully, as if he’d never heard it before. “Is that where I am?”

  “I certainly hope so. Unless I was unconscious for a lot longer than I thought.”

  “I’m unfamiliar with such a place.”

  That’s because it didn’t exist five hundred years ago, she realized. Even if she could keep Prometheus’s mind on track, he knew nothing but what his captors allowed.

  “What about the Forethought thing? Can you predict what they’ll try next?”

  “I have no prescience anymore, child. I live to be tortured and to live again. Such was my fate then. Such is my fate now.”

  Selene wanted to scream. Prometheus has resigned himself to eternal pain. Mars resigned himself to death. But I must not do the same. I must fight to survive. Theo will help. He will come for me. As he always has. Even when I push him away. And Paul will help, too. Flint. Even Dash and Philippe will not leave me here to die.

  How strange to have so many people caring for her. A week earlier, the list would not have been half so long. Yet now she knew with a sudden certainty that they would all work to rescue her.

  Whether or not they would succeed was a different story—with an ending even Prometheus could not prophesy.

  Theo stood at
the base of the Atlas statue on Fifth Avenue and looked up at the art deco Titan who carried the universe above his head. Despite the dark night, a spotlight revealed every detail of the statue’s bronze flesh. His brow creased with the strain, his pectorals bulged, and a skein of cloth across one hip covered his nakedness. His upraised arms held four massive rings forming the celestial spheres. One clearly depicted the zodiac, marked with the usual astronomical symbols for the constellations. Atlas bore the rings on a bronze yoke resting on his shoulders, embossed with the symbols of the planets themselves, from Neptune’s trident through Mercury’s caduceus. Only Jupiter was missing, obscured by Atlas’s head, or perhaps left off as a sign of the Titan’s eternal hatred for the Olympian who consigned him to hold up the universe in the first place.

  Theo scanned the rings, trying to determine which one might represent the celestial equator. Probably the one that intersects with the zodiacal ring, he decided. The two rings should coincide at two constellations, indicating the locations of the spring and fall equinoxes.

  He stepped to the statue’s other side and followed the celestial equator’s curve as it arced toward the zodiacal ring at Atlas’s left shoulder. The two rings met at Aries the Ram.

  A grim smile spread across Theo’s face. If the statue had been meant to represent Atlas in the modern day, it would’ve shown the spring equinox at Pisces. The choice of Aries meant the sculptor was aware of the movement of the equinoxes and had purposely placed the statue nearly two millennia ago—when Mithraism was at its height.

  So far so good. But now what? He wasn’t sure what he’d expected. Maybe that there’d be a secret map on the statue’s base. Or Atlas himself would be pointing toward the mithraeum’s entrance. Instead, the Titan just stared straight out from blank bronze orbs.

  “What d’ya say, Atlas?” he asked aloud. “Show me something. Don’t just stare at me.” Well, not at me, he realized. He’s looking across the street. Theo turned in place and gazed across Fifth Avenue—at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.